Some time towards the end of the fifth century, perhaps around the year 475, a band of people picked their way up a little stream which flows down between low hills west of the River Welland. Heading towards the Kibworth ridge, their track led past British villages and ruined Roman villas by Langton Brook and on Glooston Hill. Men, women and children, horses carrying packs, tents, poles and cooking pots; we might guess a couple of hundred people in all. Their war gear was not Roman – their wooden circular shields were studded with leather with iron bosses, they had dragon-patterned belt buckles, fleece-lined wooden scabbards and enamelled sword hilts. Their spears had long wide flanged blades, their horses’ harnesses had crude linked-iron bridle bits. Though there were echoes of Roman war gear in the leaders’ helmets hanging on leather straps from their saddles, these were mutated copies of Roman cavalry helmets with neck flaps and cheek pieces, but with boar’s head nasal pieces inlaid with garnets, and tinned plaques with serpents and wolves’ heads.
Among them was a striking young woman. She was of medium height – 5 foot 6 inches, well-built and strong. She was young, around twenty years – it is easy to forget that most of the new migrants must have been young. She wore a linen tube dress with a wool undergarment held by two bronze cruciform shoulder brooches with elongated horses’ heads. Her jewellery included animal bone amulets, rings and, at her waist, girdle hangers, softly tinkling, delicately punched with dotted lines of decoration: imitations of a Roman chatelaine’s keys – not real keys but symbols of her position as woman of the house, the hlafdig. Round her neck hung a bear claw amulet and a large orange fluted Roman melon bead. As for her ethnicity, that is another matter. We speak of the newcomers as Anglo-Saxons and refer to the ‘Coming of the English’ as a definable historical event; but the fact is that the population of Britain remained largely the same. The same people who were there in the Iron Age and under Rome emerge again at the end of the Dark Ages speaking Anglo-Saxon. As we cannot hear her speak we cannot tell whether she was British or of mixed race. Her dress and ornaments might indicate that she was what we call Anglo-Saxon – except the fluted Roman bead: perhaps an heirloom from her British grandmother? On such matters archaeology is silent.
They were then, we must imagine, typical of the migrants of the day, an amalgam of native Britons and older settlers – Frisians, Angles, Saxons and Danes – plus new migrants from Frisia, Jutland, Denmark and Belgium in the later fifth century. It would have been a two- to three-day journey across the wide seas – ‘ofer brad brimu’ – in long curving ships propelled with oars like the fourth-century Nydam ship from Denmark. There were clearly some Frisian-speakers. Place names such as Rothwell and Rothley contain the Frisian word roth (‘clearing’) and in two places south of the Welland migrants buried their dead with pottery from the same Frisian workshop as examples found at Saint-Gilles-les-Termonde in eastern Flanders, revealing a remarkably precise example of connections between the continent and this part of the East Midlands in around 500.
But the majority of the settlers in East Anglia and the Midlands were speakers of the Germanic dialect we call Anglian, which takes its name from a region of Schleswig still called Angeln – on a promontory projecting into the Bay of Kiel on the Baltic side of Jutland. This is where the name England comes from, as Bede writing in 721 says in his famous summary of the origin of the gens Anglorum:
From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the English.
Though the ethnic mix of early England was predominantly Celtic, the basic story of a sizeable Anglian migration from Jutland must be true. It is likely that the ancestors of many of the band who settled in Kibworth and its region had been in East Anglia for a couple of generations or more, some maybe since the end of Roman rule. Others were recent migrants come over to join their kinsmen and kinswomen. They may have had a paramount leader for whom they used the word cyning, ‘guardian of the kin’, from which comes our word ‘king’. According to an ancient Midland tradition he was a man called Icil, son of Eomer, grandson of Angeltheow and ancestor of the Mercian royal pedigree. Long afterwards this family tree was remembered by a descendant, the holy man Guthlac, who was born around 673 and whose family tree dated back to the late fifth century, counting ‘step by step’ over 200 years, the ‘oldest and noblest family in Mercia back to Icil with whom it began in days of old’.
In today’s parlance they were economic migrants as much as warbands, hoping to find a livelihood in new lands in lowland Britain. They had made their way into the East Midlands through the Welland valley, leaving as their markers cemeteries with distinctive knobbed pots; their war gear and brooches; and also their place names – as always, silent markers. The earliest stratum of place names left by Germanic migrants consists of names ending in ‘ham’, the Old English for a ‘village or collection of dwellings’. This very common English place name (West Ham, Tottenham and Fulham for example) is a marker for the early Anglo-Saxon expansion across lowland Britain from the east. It is especially associated with Roman sites, towns, villas and the roads by which they travelled in the decayed but still populous former province of Britain. These ‘ham’ names have their greatest concentration in the east, the earliest area of settlement. There are large numbers in Lincolnshire, seventy in Suffolk, nearly eighty in Norfolk and a small sprinkling in the East Midlands: six each in Rutland and Northamptonshire, a dozen in Leicestershire. This spread is indicative of the Anglian expansion out of East Anglia from around 500. The Welland, their route into Leicestershire, is not a big river (it is only navigable as far as Spalding) but it is a very old cultural boundary between zones. Its valley for example appears to have been a border zone between the Corieltauvi and the Catuvellauni. Surrounded as it is by fine farming country, it is one of the earliest settlement areas in the Midlands.
Beyond the Roman town of Medbourne, where an Anglian community had already settled, ‘marvellous goodly meadows’ stretch between Welham Hill and the Langtons, as noted by the Tudor traveller John Leland. In the area is a cluster of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, one of them on the river at Welham. It was from there perhaps in the late fifth century that a new wave of Anglian settlers moved into the lands that would become the homeland of the Middle Angles and eventually part of Mercia. From Welham, the shallow valleys of two streams fed by springs on the Kibworth ridge naturally led the migrants northwards and both are marked by early-Anglian cemeteries.
Heading on foot up towards Kibworth the traveller crosses one of the streams, the Lipping, by an ancient ford at Stonton Wyville which is still twenty yards wide in wet weather, the water deep enough to cover a car. Small but fast flowing in winter, when it can still flood neighbouring fields in the bottom of the valley, the stream is a perennial source of good water. Beyond the ford the walker passes under ‘Knaves Hill’, its name derived from the Old English cnafa, meaning ‘boy’, ‘youth’ or ‘young warrior’ – it is the site of an early-Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery. The newcomers seem to have moved along the stream and over rising country to the low ridge on which Kibworth stands today.
There on the ridge where the Roman villa stood, a Welsh-speaking community still lived, cultivating the fields by the abandoned buildings. Here perhaps one of the lesser migrant leaders and his clan stayed while another group moved into the neighbouring valley of the river the Celts called Glen. Here they settled, leaving rich warrior graves and the burial of the woman described at the top of this chapter. Close by was the former civitas of Leicester, with its Roman walls still standing, where the old British population continued to live, perhaps under a civic authority, a praefectus civitatis; maybe even with a Christian church. Big Anglo-Saxon cemeteries outside the city at Thurcaston and Humberstone are further signs of the newcomers’ presence. By now civic amenities had declined and although the Roman aqueduct still functioned, the grand civic buildings were no longer in use. From early Anglo-Saxon poetry it is easy to imagine the migrants’ response to the huge and now derelict bath house, one of the most dramatic surviving Roman buildings in Britain, now falling into ruin. ‘Wreatlic is thaes wealstan, wyrde gebraecon …’ – ‘Wondrous wallstones, broken by fate … the courtyard pavements smashed, the work of giants, their roofs fallen, the cement on their gates split by frost … the bright painted murals in the town … many the bath houses.’
The earliest English settlement at Kibworth dates from this time, around 500. Its presence was completely unsuspected till the summer of 2009, when a stratified fragment of an incised patterned early-Anglo-Saxon bone comb was found with pottery and metalworking slag under the car park of the Coach and Horses pub on the A6. These were not chance drops. The slag was perhaps from making tools or iron swords; or brooches and pins for women’s and men’s clothes, like the pair of cruciform brooches found recently by metal detectorists, which probably came from the grave of an early settler; the first traces of the ‘English’ inhabitants of the village.
From Angeln to England
So into this fragmented late-Roman world, still perhaps with its rundown but partially functioning cities and its populous countryside, the migrants came, and out of it the earliest English tribes and kingdoms emerged. They were led by kings who were able to establish dynasties and dominate their region with their armed followings, whom they rewarded with treasure, weapons, war gear, slaves, women and land. The first Anglian immigrants in the area may be dated to around 475–500, later than in East Anglia, and the first ‘kings’ arose perhaps in the sixth century. Our settlers who had journeyed overland from their core area of power in Suffolk were augmented by new migrants from across the North Sea who had come in increasing numbers into eastern Britain after the early 400s. That said, historians are still in the dark as to exactly how things happened on the ground and about the beginnings of that imperceptible process in society, language and custom by which the Roman Britons became English. How such people got their land in the Glen valley and the Kibworth hills, how they appropriated the villa sites along the Langton Brook, is not known – whether for example it was by negotiation or even treaty, through deals between Anglian cyninges and a surviving civic authority – a praepositusor praefectus civitatis in Leicester (as there was still in Lincoln in the 620s); whether it was by peaceful assimilation or by ethnic cleansing, killing the men and enslaving the women and children. Depending on local circumstances, no doubt both were the case.
Later written sources for these events are to say the least patchy. Bede wrote his great account of the origin and conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 720s at Jarrow in Northumbria on the Tyne using largely Northumbrian and Kentish sources and informants; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled from earlier material in Wessex in the 890s, inevitably has a southern viewpoint. But the annals of Mercia are lost. Our only account of these momentous events from a Midland perspective appears in much later chronicles of the thirteenth century, and is piecemeal, confused, unverifiable and hence of dubious value (because it is possible that it is simply an imaginary reconstruction.) It describes an invasion from East Anglia into the East Midlands, the lands of Middle Angles, towards 500, and the formation of an early Mercian kingdom in the Trent valley in the 570s or 580s. This account does at least match what is known from DNA and archaeology. In reality though it was perhaps not a single datable event but a long process by which British tribal groupings in the old area of the Corieltauvi were overcome by Anglian-speaking chieftains from eastern Britain with their ethnically mixed warbands. A key idea though is the tradition that just like the Goths, Vandals and Huns in their wanderings in Europe, the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain with what the Germanic tradition called cyninges – kings.
Post-Roman Kibworth then comprised both Anglian and British communities. The Anglian chief’s wooden hall was of a kind excavated at West Stow village in Suffolk (dating from the 420s to 650), a simple timber frame on a raised wooden platform set inside a fenced enclosure to keep the animals safe from rustlers and wolves. Around it were other huts, a threshing floor, a clay bread oven, a small mud and thatch horse mill, weaving sheds and a smithy working metal. Most Anglo-Saxon villages of any size would have had these. Initially we must conjecture the native and Anglian communities lived alongside each other but separately (as for example is implied by the place name Walton, north of Kibworth: the ‘tun of the Welsh’). The area the Anglo-Saxon migrants chose for their first settlement was a few hundred yards away from the Iron Age fields of the Britons, on rising ground near the site of the Roman cemetery, suggesting that at first they deliberately put down roots away from the huts of Britons. The find of slag, pottery and a bone comb fragment places the early centre at the present Coach and Horses pub, on the ancient track which in time would become ‘the King’s highway’ and then Main Street and finally the A6: the core of today’s village of Kibworth.
This first century of ‘English’ history is shrouded in darkness. During this time the tale of the migration was shaped into a narrative in the courts of various early kings of Angles and Saxons. In modern times a number of royal and noble burials have given insight into the early culture of the Anglo-Saxons, such as the ship burials at Sutton Hoo and Snape and most recently the rich East Saxon princely grave uncovered at Prittlewell by Southend. But despite the almost incredible riches of the seventh-century Staffordshire treasure, archaeologists have not yet found the grave of any early chief of Mercia. But there is one key area of evidence. We know these early Mercian kings were commemorated in song, that their pedigrees were handed down in poems that hark back to the migration period, like Beowulf, which was originally composed in an Anglian-speaking region perhaps on the edge of the Fens. Memories and traditions of the migration-era kings were turned into heroic narratives which were recited and sung by bards before the hearth in the king’s hall. ‘Since we first came over the wide waves, seeking Britain, to overcome the Welsh and win ourselves a kingdom’ as a later poem put it. In Anglo-Saxon culture this foundation myth was told and retold for centuries; rather as in the USA immigrants from Ireland and Italy maintain a tenacious loyalty to the idea of their places of origin.
The voice of the Anglian migrants themselves can be faintly heard in their earliest poems, like Widsith, Deor and Beowulf, which though composed much later contain oral traditions harking back to real people and events in the late fifth century. Of course, no written texts exist from the English themselves from this time. Except for a few runic inscriptions, writing only starts among them when their rulers adopted Christianity, starting in Kent in 597. But in their oral stories the Mercians and later English preserved dynastic pedigrees and heroic tales of their ancestors before they came to England. The possibility of a historical kernel to such material has often been rejected by modern historians, but oral traditions can have great tenacity – after the migrations of Indo-European speakers into late-Bronze Age India poems were preserved with uncanny linguistic accuracy for two millennia before they were committed to writing.
The early Old English poems were all composed in the Anglian dialect and some contain very archaic survivals in verse forms, metre, language, images and stories. For example, one of the earliest Old English poems about a bard called Widsith contains fragments of royal deeds and genealogies from before the migration: stories about kings’ deeds, their generosity, gift-giving and success in war. These were the kind of songs sung in the royal and noble halls of the Middle Angles around Kibworth in the Dark Ages. One in particular long remembered in Mercia was the tale of a continental chief called Offa of Angeln (after whom the famous eighth-century king of Mercia was named). This Offa may have lived in the fourth century AD and around him in later times legends gathered among the Anglian peoples in Britain which were put into writing in eighth- and ninth-century Mercia, and were still available as traditions in the later Middle Ages in the great cult centre at St Albans, where they had particular reason to remember the generosity of the Mercian royal family. In these legends the ancient Offa lived on the continent three generations after Woden, but more realistically was the father of Angeltheow, grandfather of Eomer and great-great-grandfather of Icil, who was viewed as the founder of the Mercian dynasty in Britain and was perhaps the chief who led the migration into the Midlands. This first Offa also appears in Beowulf – ‘famed for his fighting and giving by men worldwide; spear-bold warrior he ruled wisely with wisdom over his inheritance …’
These poems give us a sense of the heroic culture which the Anglian warbands brought with them into the Midlands of Britain around 500, within living memory of the migrations. Traditions partly invented no doubt, but partly commemorating real ancestors of the kings who would rule in the English Midlands in the seventh to eighth centuries and create the first kingdom of what they called the ‘patria of all the English’. Even if all the stages were not accurately remembered such poetic genealogies contain the kind of real pedigrees found in pre-industrial societies across the world, where the descent of kings and heroes is always best recorded, from the Rig Veda to Homer and the Irish epics. It is likely then that Angeltheow and Eomer were real chiefs in Europe, that Icil was the man who either brought his kin group to Britain or who founded a kingly line in Britain at some date between the late fifth century and the 510s or 520s: ‘the famous and most noble kin among the Angles, descended from the royal line of Icil’. If anyone, it was this man who led his clan and his warband from East Anglia into the land of the Middle Angles around 500.
Change and continuity
By the mid-500s the British-speaking societies of the eastern part of Britain had fallen under the domination of the newcomers. The news by then had travelled to the other end of the Mediterranean. In a report that must have sounded rather like a tale from another planet, in the 540s in Constantinople the historian Procopius spoke through a Latin interpreter to an Angle travelling with a Frankish embassy who told him that Britain was no longer ‘Roman’ but now divided between the indigenous Britons, Angles and Frisians. Later Midland traditions indeed refer to a push west in the middle of the sixth century, and to wars in the Midlands in which the Angles were victorious and the Britons driven into flight. Modern geneticists have speculated that there was ethnic cleansing in some areas of the East Midlands with the massacre of male populations and the enslaving of the women, but as yet this is only speculation. By the middle of the sixth century the Angles were the dominant element in the population. But how they gained their land here – by fighting; by occupying empty land where they began to plough and raise stock; whether they even negotiated with a still surviving local British aristocracy – whether in fact the Corieltauvi in some sense became the Middle Angles – cannot be known. It may be that in some places the newcomers drove out or killed the menfolk and took British women as their wives. In others they clearly settled alongside the indigenous population, opening up new land in marginal areas. In the Kibworth area one or two field names have survived from Welsh speech; the most important being the open field name Cric or Gric in Kibworth Beauchamp, a tiny hint, could it be, that Beauchamp began as a settlement of dependent Welsh serfs?
But none of this is firm enough to build on. All we know for sure in the Kibworth area is given us by the buried woman described at the beginning of this chapter, the warrior graves found near her, the two women’s brooches picked up by metal detectors at Kibworth, and the bone comb, slag and pottery under the Coach and Horses car park. That is as far as it goes for the first century of the ‘English’. The newcomers lived alongside the native British-speakers, who still farmed their big furlongs and tended their flocks of sheep, perhaps trading their surplus with an Anglian lord. But stratified among the finds under the Coach and Horses, the smelting slag and pottery show they had come to stay.
The catastrophic sixth century
By the middle of the sixth century Anglians and Frisians had settled under their lords in the lands between Glen and the Welland where Kibworth now lies, and around them lived the indigenous British population with whom over time they intermarried and merged identities. All perhaps owed allegiance to a ‘king’ who ruled in the old Roman city of Leicester. In time the patchwork of tribes occupying the fens and wolds between East Anglia and Leicestershire became known as Middle Angles, their ethnic roots of diverse origins, Celtic and Danish, Germanic and Frisian. The genetic makeup of the early Anglo-Saxons then was particularly mixed. But out of them the English would emerge.
The first century of this new society was particularly hard. Anyone who was lucky enough to survive and live to an old age on the low ridge above the Glen where Kibworth now stands, who lived through the century after the fall of Rome, would have seen far-reaching changes. Between the third and seventh centuries the archaeological record of settlements has suggested that the population of lowland Britain fell to less than a million, fewer people than a millennium before in the Iron Age. Climatologists tell us that the early Anglo-Saxons suffered from colder and wetter climate conditions between the fourth and ninth centuries, culminating in a mini-Ice Age in the early tenth. One of the biggest and most wide-ranging events was a catastrophic volcanic dust storm followed by pestilence in the 540s. The great plagues of the 540s and 680s and the natural catastrophes such as the so-called narrow tree ring event of 536 have attracted a lot of attention from historians recently. Ice cores reveal an extensive acidic dust layer. The health and growth of trees (as seen in annual growth rings for a fifteen-year period) were greatly diminished across the northern hemisphere. Annals from Ireland in the west and as far as China in the east describe the impact: prolonged dry fog, crop failure and acute bread shortages. The historian Procopius, who was alive then, says that during 536 ‘a most dreadful portent took place: the sun gave forth its light without brightness, and it seemed very like the sun in eclipse for the beams it sent forth had no brightness.’ The contemporary Byzantine administrator and antiquarian John Lydus speaks of a full year of half-light which killed all the crops. A later chronicler, Michael Syrian, says the sun was dimmed for eighteen months: ‘each day it shone only for four hours and even then its light was but a feeble shadow, so that the fruits did not ripen.’ The statesman and scholar Cassiodorus writing in Constantinople is our most vivid eyewitness: ‘we were astonished to see no shadow of ourselves at noon, to feel the mighty strength of the sun enfeebled and the phenomena that accompany an eclipse prolonged for almost a whole year. We have had a summer without heat, the crops have been chilled, blasted by north winds, and rain denied.’
This is what the people in the villages of Britain experienced too. Tree rings cut from bog oaks excavated in Ireland show the British Isles were as severely affected. Though long ignored or underestimated, these were great events, their effects more widespread than those of any battle or change of dynasty, the most protracted short-term cooling in the northern hemisphere known over the last 2,000 years. Tree ring specialists think the fifteen-year period after the initial impact in 536 was catastrophic, and it is probably no coincidence that in the middle of that period plague swept across the Eurasian landmass as far as Britain. The cause is generally identified as a huge eruption on the scale of Tambora in 1815 (the biggest since the last Ice Age) or the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Though its extent has been disputed, when we see the effect of a minor eruption in Iceland in 2010 it can be seen that environmental damage could have been tremendous and an almost unbearable strain on subsistence farmers who worked the fields under their lords in the Britain of the Dark Ages. As with the aftermath of 1815, in what was known as the ‘year without a summer’, most deaths were due to starvation and disease as the fallout ruined agriculture. Even in Western Europe, failed harvests brought famine and typhus: newspapers in 1815 told of hill farmers’ families in Wales travelling the roads of England begging for food. Harvests also failed and livestock died in large areas of the northern hemisphere. Such events though thinly recorded perhaps help account for the decline in population and the depression of society visible in the archaeological records across Western Europe.
This natural disaster of 536 was followed by the great plague of 541–2: ‘a universal plague through the world which killed the noblest third of the human race’ as Procopius described it. Pestilence continued to return to the Mediterranean basin through the sixth century and into the seventh, ending with the great plague of 682. The mortality figures are unknown but the Black Death in the fourteenth century killed a third of the population, maybe more (as we shall see, two thirds of the tenants in Kibworth died). The later plague changed everything: work patterns, labour law, freedom itself, but we have no idea how the sixth-century disasters unfolded: whether for example the deprived peasantry who survived won economic freedoms in a contracted agricultural economy. No one knows. But a comparable catastrophe in the sixth century may be the single most important reason for the steep drop in population from its height in the late-Roman world (some think 4–5 million) down to 2 million in the eleventh century. Though largely unknown in the historical record, it may be then that the biggest event of the late-Roman world and the Dark Ages was the plague. It contributed to the collapse of society back to subsistence conditions in many places; and in Britain the technological level of the fourth century was perhaps not regained till the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century.
The village: 500–700
So the first English settlement grew up at Kibworth in very harsh times, emerging in the sixth century in poverty and hardship out of the older Roman British world: its population a Roman-British core (particularly of women) with a smaller Anglian elite. Kibworth was not yet a village, or at least not as we imagine the English village, as a concentrated mythic image of the eternal unchanging English landscape. The origins of the English village are comparatively recent, nucleated from the tenth century onwards by powerful lords in a swathe from Devon to Northumberland. Older patterns continued (and still continue) in the hill country of the west and south-west, where a landscape of isolated Iron Age farms still remains; but the open-field landscape of the English Midlands with its nucleated villages, of which Kibworth is a classic example, only developed after the Viking Age.
Throughout the sixth century the settlement at Kibworth (and thousands like it) was just a fenced enclosure containing the farmstead of the Anglo-Saxon lord and his extended kin, the scattered houses of the peasants and serfs, a cattle barn, a bread oven, a well, a threshing floor and a cattle corral of hurdles and thorn brakes, with perhaps an outer enclosure of brushwood to keep out wolves and bandits. The people lived in platform huts roofed in reed thatch or wooden shingles, and the craftsmen and craftswomen worked in weaving sheds and woodsmen’s workshops with one end sunk below ground, like those excavated at Stow in Suffolk (dating from AD 420–650). Such sunken huts were still used into the twentieth century by the wood turners of Bucklebury in Berkshire, the last of whom as late as the Second World War made wooden bowls on a pole lathe as his ancestors in the Dark Ages had done. (This wooden tableware, which was used by most ordinary people until the early modern world, is called in English dialect ‘treen’, an Old English word signifying ‘made of tree’.) Compared with the Roman world this was a subsistence existence but it was the life of most ordinary people in England until comparatively recently, even in some places well beyond the Industrial Revolution.
In the wooden hall of the lord there may have been some imported luxuries. A description of a local nobleman’s house in the seventh century hints at possessions: ‘a dwelling house furnished with an abundance of goods of all kinds in the district of the Middle Angles’. There the lord gave hospitality to his warband, as in traditional Germanic society, the women (as in Beowulf ) ‘offering the joy of the hall’, serving mead and greeting guests, ‘carrying the flagon, filling the cups the warriors held out’. The headman was thehlaford (our word ‘lord’, literally the ‘bread giver’); his wife, the hlafdig (the ‘bread kneader’ – the lady). Soon the Angles were intermarrying with the locals and in the village over time the language and customs of the Angles would replace those of the Welsh. Welsh was still spoken in the region in the early eighth century, but in the landscape the Britons left few things save river names.
In the runes: words and thoughts
Kibworth in the Dark Ages was a subsistence place whose horizons had closed down. Hardly any finds from between 500 and 900 were found in the village dig in 2009. One sherd of eighth-century pottery suggests that they used clay and wooden tableware, wooden spades and rakes, even wooden ploughs – though it would be hard to plough the heavy clays around Kibworth without iron. But there is scanty evidence to bring the people to life. They have not yet got names; nor has the place. Its British name is yet to be discovered; its medieval and modern name, which means the enclosure of a man called Cybba – Kibworth – will come later.
The people of Kibworth were illiterate and it is very unlikely anyone in the village came into close contact with literacy at this time. But the small class of priests and seers among the pagan Anglo-Saxons used a system of writing before the Latin script was reintroduced into lowland Britain by missionaries from the Church of Rome. Starting in the fifth century in Frisia, the continental Angles, Saxons and Frisians used a system of writing which they brought over with them from the continent to Britain. They called it ‘futhorc’ – we call it runes – and it was the script of priests and seers, the ritual specialists. Incised or marked on bones, pottery, ivory combs, it was a system of twenty-six signs, later expanded to thirty-three. Each magical sign had a phonetic value but also a meaning in itself, and as we search for a way into the thought-world of our early ancestors, clues perhaps lie in these magical symbols.
One cluster of signs denotes aspects of material life – wealth, need, distress, gift, cup, torch, joy. A further group describes the weather – sun, hail, ice – and another trees – oak, ash, birch, yew, thorn. Animals named include horses and aurochs. Some allude loosely to time – day, year, harvest – and to nature – stone, land and lake. Weapons of course figure in the futhorc signs – spear and bow – and the masculine world – warrior, estate, ride, hero. Finally, death and the hereafter are found in the signs for grave and god. ‘God’, like ‘soul’, it is as well to remember, is a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon word. The pagans too believed in such things.
To the modern reader these mysterious glyphs – scratched or incised on disc brooches, burial urns, weapons, bone tools and combs – appear fantastically allusive precursors to what will become the English language. It reveals a world-view and images that will run through Anglo-Saxon poetry with its down-to-earth fatalistic and ruminative streak. In them perhaps we can glimpse the bedrock of the speech, thought and values of the early villagers. Few such early texts exist (only with Christianity and Latin script do we get full-length texts) and only as grave inscriptions and commemorations on the continent. In England about thirty fragmentary runic inscriptions have been deciphered on bone combs, sword hilts and sherds: brief signifiers or prayers for auspiciousness. Some are men’s and women’s names. A recent find near Leicester was of a runic inscription on a pair of disc-headed pins representing the name of a woman, Ceolburg. Among the few longer inscriptions that have enough characters to be read is one from the East Midlands that recalls our dead twenty-year-old at the start of this chapter. It reads, ‘the grave of Sithaebaed the maid …’
Religion
The people of the village like most of the early English were pagans, worshipping their ancestral gods from Jutland – Thor, Woden, Thunor – and the auspicious deities of forest, river and spring of their British neighbours. They made offerings at trees, rocks and rivers, performed animal sacrifices, and did bloodlettings to propitiate spirits and avert the inauspicious hour, mixing blood or semen in their food for magical protection, fertility or potency.
The narrative of English history from the seventh century is portrayed in our histories as Christian. But in truth, as always, the reality was more complex. The conversion took many centuries and was perhaps never quite fully accomplished, at least in the terms in which the Church saw it. The early villagers had come with their ancestral gods from the continent: gods of storm and thunder, gods of fertility and auspiciousness. Faint traces of less salubrious demons (in the old English language) survived in the landscape near Kibworth until early modern times – Thyrspit in Nevill Holt and Shuggborowe in Burton Overy, where demons lurked; Tommor in Great Easton (a hobgoblin) – and Grendels (the name of the water demon in Beowulf ) were ubiquitous denizens of ponds, meres and water-filled pits. That such names have survived at all is testimony to the lingering power of these folk beliefs – a world of fairies and demons which declined only after the sixteenth-century Reformation. One particularly strong aspect of this, which was inherited by the early English from the Roman and Celtic past, is the ancient sacred wells that were mainly adopted by the Church in the Middle Ages but still survive all over England. Also noteworthy is the persistence of the belief in sacred trees, mentioned disparagingly by Bede in the eighth century. The meeting place of the jurors of the local hundred right up to the eighteenth century, as we have seen, was at the ‘Gartree’, a landmark tree on an ancient burial mound.
And close to Kibworth one sacred tree had a very long afterlife. In the woods at Great Easton a place called Holyoak Lodge marks the site of a pagan Anglo-Saxon shrine to the god of thunder, Thunor, which seems to have been worshipped long after the arrival of Christianity. As late as the twelfth century a little Christian hermitage – the Mirabel – was built close by to combat the continuing superstition of the locals. And on the gravestones in Kibworth for the last three centuries can be seen the names of the Holyoak family, who still flourish in Kibworth today. The thought-world of Old English paganism is by and large lost to us, but its sensibility underlies the later culture and language – and religion – of the English people.